KIRKUS REVIEW

Novelist and amateur
sailor Foy (Creative Writing/New York Univ.; Zero Decibels: The Quest
for Absolute Silence, 2010, etc.), who sees technology as a distinctly
mixed blessing, chronicles his journey up the New England coast in a rickety
boat without satellite guidance.

In a poetically written,
occasionally fragmented account, the author traces his attempts to emulate with
more success his great-great grandfather, who died when his ship went down in
the frigid waters off Norway. Before taking off on the brief sail from Cape Cod
to Maine described in two chapters, in which the author nearly falls off the
ship during high winds and reluctantly uses GPS to navigate to shore through
the fog once he has reached his destination, he undertook some other
navigation-related adventures. He got lost in “a casual sort of way” on his way
to NYU’s biology lab to explore how cells make their ways to their proper
positions; encountered “the dark heart of GPS” at Schriever Air Force Base in
Colorado; and hitched a ride with a Haitian boat captain who steers by the
stars. Later, he headed off to Norway to try, with questionable success, to
find the spot in the ocean where his ancestor’s ship went down. Attempts to
work in his feelings about the recent death of his brother take the book off
course, and speculations about the connection between the increase in the number
of Alzheimer’s cases and the more frequent use of GPS are far-fetched. The
author’s work is most successful at its most visceral: the feeling of
“slaloming around lobster trap buoys, like a plane lost in clouds,” or the
sight of life jackets, “hung like orange fruit in the rigging.”

Armchair sailors will
enjoy the vicarious thrills of Foy’s brief journeys, and even those with no
intentions of abandoning their smartphones will find something to ponder in his
speculations about the challenges of gadget-free navigation.

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